I wanted to let everyone know that at the moment I am recovering from being ill from a nasty Cold that hit me around my birthday. It has taken nearly a week to recovery between from the high fever and liberal doses of NyQuil and DayQuil. For about three days, reality was alternated, twisted...to the degree that I couldn't stay awake during
Burn Notice! Anyway, Sunday has been my return to reality, and a return to the massive Super-Soldier blogpost. No. More. NyQuil.
HUZZAH!..:)
ReplyDeleteOh, man, I'm sorry to hear you got sick. Good thing you're due to be off the sick list soon, trooper- we've got some more nasty aliens to fight. It must be all those damn UFOs and things, flying around laying chem-trails to give people nasty colds on their birthdays. You've gotsa watch thems aliens- they are all sneaky-like.
ReplyDeleteI found that E.E. "Doc" Smith's space epic "Triplanetary" is freely available online from Project Gutenberg- check it out if you want some pure, pulpish space opera. You will see space pirates, artificial planetoids, deadly rays melt spaceships into still glowing sprays of molten metal, fearsome alien creatures, inertialess spaceships traveling faster than light, and who knows what else. Naturally, our space-faring future as a Kardashev Type-2 will look exactly like this. :-)
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20782
Christopher Phoenix
I have been doing some research into E.E. "Doc" Smith's work for the super-soldier post...have to check that out.
ReplyDeleteE.E. "Doc" Smith is definitely worth a look, even just for the history of SF. Many of our favorite inventions appear in these stories- death rays, deflector shields, ray-screens, sub-ether (sub-space?), and of course space armor. The stories are fun, but a bit dated. The science is out-of-date, especially the idea that planets are very, very rare in the universe and that iron could be a source of atomic energy. I've not read the Skylark or Lensman series, but I've seen "Triplanetary" and "Spacehounds of the IPC", which have similar scientific assumptions, technology, and aliens (ray-guns, space drives that involve "projectors", inertialess drives, Martians, Jovians, etc.). The most dated aspect is the pulpish writing, which is fun for space battles but rather cheesy when applied to romantic entanglements. But there really is no point in judging something that is almost 90 years old, especially when you get to see Neptunians burned out of the ether. :-)
ReplyDeleteChristopher Phoenix